It is reasonable to presume that USC has a well-developed and comprehensive South Asian Studies program, given that the second-largest group of international students at USC is from India and the robust amount of South Asian student organizations. But USC has failed in its course selection to represent that important minority of its student population, leaving its South Asian students without support to learn about a central part of their identity.

Our University has academically disregarded the representation of our South Asian student population, only recently relenting due to the efforts of Indra Mukhopadhyay, the creator of the current South Asian studies minor, established in Fall 2023.

Mukhopadhyay said in an interview with the Daily Trojan that the program’s comparative underdevelopment was due to selective grants awarded in the 1960s to start “area studies programs.” Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies awarded grants to cultural departments that were already established at universities. The grants were instead awarded to the East Asian Studies program.

USC, at the time, had early strength in its recently developed Chinese and Japanese language and history programs, which led to its growth through federal support for the East Asian Studies program.

My mother immigrated from Fiji to the United States, and last semester was the first time I learned about my great-great-grandfather’s coerced migration on the Leonidas, the first ship to bring Indians to Fiji as indentured servants in 1879.

I’ve learned extensively about the diaspora through oral history accounts and articles emailed to me by professors and relatives. However, when looking towards my publicly promoted “premier research institution” for structural support to learn about my heritage, I’ve found a minor that serves as little more than an academic sedative.

The inaccessibility to an analysis of South Asian migration and colonial socioeconomic governance reflects a critical failure in the current courses offered. The minor’s lower division courses reduce rich history and powerful cultural traditions to something you’d find in a wellness influencer’s yogi retreat program.

Many of the minors’ lower-division introductory courses do not provide an in-depth exploration of South Asian culture and history, with some reducing the region’s rich traditions to yoga and Bollywood. These courses are offered as alternatives to students unwilling to engage with essential history, something the minor shouldn’t allow.

The strength of the minor’s course list lies in the upper-division offerings exploring historical and ethnoracial topics of migration and displacement in the Indian Ocean. It offers a variety of courses that analyze the religious makeup of South Asia, avoiding simplification of the region’s diverse religious identities.

On top of this, the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ 15 formally offered languages excludes Hindi from the list, rendering the language irrelevant for academic accreditation. USC does not guarantee courses beyond Hindi I, providing students with no real opportunity to learn a language closely tied to the survival of their cultural identity.

Mukhopadhyay said the University’s Hindi program lacked depth because, once a longstanding Hindi professor left the school, they did not rehire due to a lack of student interest, proving the weight of student-led advocacy.

In a highly competitive job market, if USC provides a pathway for students to obtain formal linguistic recognition for Hindi, a language spoken by over 600 million people, it could contribute to students’ professional and intellectual development.

USC must expand its South Asian studies beyond a minor and establish its own department, and offer foundational history on the system of indentured servitude, the partition of India, colonial rule and the pattern of economic coercion across the diaspora. South Asian students need academic representation,

But it appears to me that, despite USC having over 20 collaborative partnerships with Indian universities and research organizations, its failure to secure Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies funding has been compounded by more than 60 years of disregard for the importance of the South Asian studies program.

It is thus made clear to prospective South Asian students that deciding to join the Trojan family means participating in an academic culture that indirectly promotes cultural homogenization. Without a developed South Asian studies major program and external support, USC administration frames a desire to explore historical identity as an irrelevant academic interest.

Mukhopadhyay spoke to me with my same voracious desire to see the University expand access to the history that South Asians began cultivating in 3300 BCE. But bureaucratic University constraints place the availability of the South Asian studies major, if created, beyond our time at USC.

As Mukhopadhyay recalled, student-led coalition building, supplemented by faculty support, led to the creation of the minor. He emphasized that the University’s development of the program relied heavily on that demonstrated student interest, proving the weight of student-led advocacy.

Solidarity across campus cultural groups and USC students is necessary to communicate to the University the need to direct funding toward the program’s future development.

Cultivating support from the South Asian community and its allies at USC, from students, alumni and faculty, can apply unprecedented pressure on the University to finally show some substantial respect for the cultural and socioeconomic history of one of the Trojan Family’s largest demographics. If we are to combat the chronic underfunding of South Asian studies that began with the implementation of Title VI, it will first require a concerted effort to decide that 145 years is enough.